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A wagyu-focused lunch spot near Lake Kawaguchi. The ¥2,500 Oishi Gozen set — wagyu beef bowl with tempura — is the signature. Mt. Fuji fills the window.
A free lakeside park on Lake Kawaguchiko where shibazakura, nemophila, lavender, and kochia each take turns in front of Mt. Fuji through the year.
There is a stretch of the Kawaguchiko walking trail — maybe 300 meters long, on the northeast shore where the Misaka-michi road meets the lake — where the path passes under a row of weeping cherries that bloom a week…
Lake Saiko is the quiet middle child of Japan’s Fuji Five Lakes. It’s the fourth one west of Tokyo, sitting between its busier neighbors — Kawaguchiko to the east (all hotels and sightseeing boats) and the smaller, wilder Shoji and…
There’s a moment on the approach — after the bus turns off the lake road, after the parking lot, after you hand over ¥500 at the ticket window — where you look up and realize the thing you’re about to…
You sit on the wooden veranda at Ryoanji with maybe forty other people, and for a minute nobody says anything. The rock garden in front of you is not large — about the size of a tennis court — and…
Unzen sits on a volcano, at about 700 meters up on the Shimabara Peninsula in Nagasaki, and you notice this before you see any of it. The road from the coast narrows, bends, and then suddenly you smell sulfur —…
Hana no Miyako Koen (花の都公園) sits just north of Lake Yamanaka at around 1,000 meters elevation, and it’s one of the few places in the Fuji Five Lakes where the cherry blossoms and the tulips are in bloom at the…
Hiruzen is one of those places Japan seems to have decided, for a season, to try being Switzerland. Rolling pasture, Jersey cows with serious eyelashes, a three-peak ridge in the distance that takes most of a day to walk end-to-end.…
Drive forty minutes north of Okayama on the Yonago Expressway, get off at Hiruzen IC, turn left at a farm stand selling milk, and you come across something you don’t expect to see surrounded by dairy pasture: a three-story wooden…
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